


whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them

by JoCarthage



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: (Spoilers for Moby Dick), HE SAILS TO SAFETY ON QUEEQUEG's COFFIN, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Moby Dick AU - ish?, This takes place in NY around 1851 and I didn't do any further research for it, and a lifetime of her insisting the Queequeg and Ishmael are just best dude friends, if that isn't your jam, other than a lifetime of Moby Dick being my mother's favorite book, that is totally cool, they get married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 04:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21173456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: The truth was, Alex had actually never been on a ship before. Oh, he told the Captain he'd sailed all the way here from England; but that was in his mother's belly. He had lived his 18 years -- not the 20 he wrote on his form, just to be safe, and to be sure the wages came to him and not any parent who might try to claim him -- between 18th and 101st streets, never venturing off the Island of Manhattan. Because who needed to? It was a beautiful place with food and warmth -- well, not for him, not anymore. Not after weeks of sleeping in dirty church basements and, just once but once was enough, in the Trinity Church cemetery.





	whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by: when I took the PSAT in high school I had to write the codes for 7 colleges I wanted my score to go to. Instead of MIT, I accidentally wrote the code for the college one line up -- the US Merchant Marine Academy. The very nice admissions office there sent me a 1/2 page brochure with enough space for a 300 word essay and told me if I mailed it back, I could come to NY and be a merchant marine.
> 
> For the next two weeks of AP classes, extra curricular, auditions and captianing the wrestling team, I dreamed about spending 6 months of the year at sea. I'd always liked sailing, though my only experience was on the 1970s-era Razor sailboat I scrounged from the garage of my step-dad's family cabin on Lune Lake in Wisconsin.
> 
> Like culinary school, I didn't end up applying. And while I'm happy with my undergraduate degree, when I am working my political job, or exhausted from this particular version of my life, I daydream about living at sea for 6 months out of the year.
> 
> \--
> 
> Also, Moby Dick is my Mom's favorite book. Really. Like, once we were at family camp and there's all of these family activities they announce on the first day, and there's always a joke activity -- crocodile wrestling (in CA's Sierra Nevada mountains), scuba diving in the lake (where visibility is about 2.1 inches). One year, the joke activity was everyone gathering at the campfire on a particular day and reading their favorite selections from Moby Dick.
> 
> They had forgotten on key thing.
> 
> This wasn't just any family camp.
> 
> It was the family camp for alums of a deeply nerdy university.
> 
> 18 people showed up at the campfire that night with 6 copies of Moby Dick -- some of them had driven 3 hours round-trip on their vacations to the nearest used bookstore to have a copy ready. *The others had brought their own copies camping*. My Mom lead the readings as the campstaff stared on in awe of these incredibly fucking nerdy adults.
> 
> None of these stories above fit the vibe of the piece below, but I just wanted to explain, to my best of my knowledge of my own brain, where the heck it came from.

The truth was, Alex had actually never been on a ship before. Oh, he told the Captain he'd sailed all the way here from England; but that was in his mother's belly. He had lived his 18 years -- not the 20 he wrote on his form, just to be safe, and to be sure the wages came to him and not any parent who might try to claim him -- between 18th and 101st streets, never venturing off the Island of Manhattan. Because who needed to? It was a beautiful place with food and warmth -- well, not for him, not anymore. Not after weeks of sleeping in dirty church basements and, just once but once was enough, in the Trinity Church cemetery.

So. 

The Merchant Marines.

6 months at sea a year for the next 10 years. Guaranteed food, wages, retirement -- he just needed to be able to survive it. Just --

He glanced into the midnight darkness behind him in the dockside alley where he'd been gathering his courage, sure he heard footsteps. Some, he heard coming all the time, the slap of Navy boots on every cobblestone he stumbled on in his half-rotted landsman's shoes. But sometimes, just sometimes, his hopeful heart brought him the sound of other feet, quieter, thrice-mended boots, a lilting gait to go with a lilting voice.

But that beloved voice's last memory would always be a scream, that beloved body's last sound would always be a crunch, and Alex would be wearing a scarf to cover the handprint across his throat for the next few two weeks.

Someone shoved him out into the hovering light of the gas lamps and he whipped around -- to see just another sailor.

"Sorry," he heard the man mutter and as he shuffled towards the gangplank to the _USS Honeysuckle_. Alex had thought -- hoped really -- there would be some kind of training, some kind of delay, just to give him -- but no. The Captain had said they were scheduled to ship out on the morning tide, trying to beat a monster storm out to sea. No time for goodbyes; no time for any soft step to find him.

Alex trod up the gangplank, the murky water filtering chunkily around the prow of the _Honeysuckle_. He followed the gestures of the few multilingual crewmen on the boat -- most were out drinking their wages and would sluff aboard as dawn peaked over the skyline. A man with dark skin gestured to a steep ladder and Alex let the cover of the boat eclipse his last glimpse of the New York skyline. He found his berth, his own 6 ft by 3 ft space, above the head of one and at the feet of two other men; _they_ were on shore-leave and wouldn't be back until dawn. Someone had left a new pair of boots on his pillow, treads still fresh from the workshop. The best signing-bonus he could have asked for as he shucked his old shoes, shoving them under the foot of his mattress.

There was a knock at his door, and he stood, one boot on, fighting his body's flinch at the sound. He didn't know the etiquette on a ship, but assumed if someone knocked, he should answer. 

He stepped forward, hearing the deck creak beneath him, legs stumbling against the tilt and slant of a body on the waves. It would be worse out at sea, he knew. He would just have to learn fast, with 6 months of no land, no -- 

He opened the door and there was a crack, not from the sails or the brewing storm or men on the docks, but inside his tender heart. _Michael_. He yanked him into the room with him, slamming the door shut with his back as he crashed into him, hands in his hair, body tight against his, thigh between his legs, hands just -- grasping whatever he could touch. Michael's hand, still broken, fingertips gentle on the bandage, his body _there_, tight and still _his_. 

Michael traced loving, worrying patterns across Alex's skin, traced every place his father had touched on that last, horrible night in the attic of their Alphabet City walk-up, the lone warm place Alex had been able to find for Michael after his placement at the workhouse got to be too much for either of them to bear.

Kissing Michael again was like breathing, like touching some part of himself that had been cut off from circulation too long, that gave him some precious thing he needed to survive. But he needed to know --

"How?" Alex gasped, mouth tight on Michael's living, burning pulse.

"I checked every single ship heading out this week," Michael stuttered out as he fumbled Alex's jacket off his shoulders, seemingly as desperate for _skin_ as Alex was. Alex forced the lock closed behind Michael's back; they had hours until anyone else would come.

Michael was still talking: "I asked if anyone had seen  a scared kid with a ring of bruises around his throat. Captain Antietem said you'd just signed on and they could use another hand; one who knew a rudder from a prow, perhaps." And there it was, that wicked, careless grin Alex had seen in the work yard, that had drawn him across every boundary anyone had ever set for him. That smile that had brought him here, had set him free. Michael pressed his forehead against Alex's, and the curving shape of him was so perfect, Alex almost couldn't _breathe_. "Captain said you looked like you could use a friend. I said I was that friend. He clapped me on the shoulder and said --"

"'Welcome aboard, son.'"

Alex nodded, chancing a glance up into Michael's whiskeylight eyes.

"Truly, you are here? What about --"

Michael pressed his mouth against Alex's: "I forsake nothing I could not leave willingly. If I had to choose between all the riches of the Island of Manhattan -- not that I had any access to them, but just imagining -- and moments more with you, I'd choose you. Every time, Alex. Every time."

"But your hand, how will --"

Michael crooked a smile: "Seamen are used to injuries, know how to keep a strong man working around them. I'm already hired, Alex. I'm _here_."

And Alex -- he closed his eyes, biting back his worries, imagining the idiocy of using these few hours cataloging them. He tossed every namable fear overboard, letting them sink into the musty waters of the Hudson, one by one, stones in dark water. Instead of giving them voice, he raised his arms up again, wrapped Michael in them, and _showed_ him what a future they'd bought. Together.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a quote from, you guessed it, Moby-Dick:  
“And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.”  
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/queequeg
> 
> The following contains spoilers for Moby Dick, because FML.
> 
> Ok, I find I have more to say about Queequeg/Ishmael. Like, as you might have gathered from above, I have an intense, historical relationship with that stupid whaling book. I love it too, I love the prose and the opening* and the madness and specificity of the history of whaling.
> 
> But I also love the queer love story that forms at the heart of it. The dynamic I alluded to here, where Alex's place on the ship is secured by Michael's competence, is the beginning of the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael. 
> 
> I'm going to retell it below as I remember it, which is not to say, exactly as it is written in the book. Enjoy.
> 
> Ishmael and Queequeg end up meeting -- no fucking joke -- because ~there's not enough beds at the inn, so the inkeeper is like "are you ok sharing a bed" and Ishmael is like "sure?" and the innkeeper is super racist and like "well, the only bed is with a cannibal" and Ishmael's like "I've done weirder things, let me meet him" and then he tells Queequeg he's cool sharing a bed "as long as you don't eat me" and Queequeg is like "you're not my type, but I'll open a window so when I smoke my massive bong in bed we don't suffocate" (I remember smoking in bed and a window but not the exact circumstances of who wanted the window open, but everything else is true.) There's a lot of otherizing, orientalizing description of Queequeg's boby, particularly his extensive tattoos. Even though the way they're framed is always objectifying and gross, I've always loved Queequeg's tattoos. Thus the title of this piece.
> 
> Anyway, so Ishmael is like, "I'm going to be a sailor!" and Queequeg is like, "um hmm." But he likes this ridiculously cuddly bastard, so when Ishmael is trying to talk his way onto Captain Ahab's ship, and failing pretty badly. Queequeg steps up, grabs a whaling spear, and throws it, like, the entire length of the ship, piercing the far mast so deep no one can get the spear out but him. Captain Ahab looks at wimpy Ishmael, looks at Superman Queequeg, and is like: "You can join as long as your actually competent friend comes too."
> 
> Queequeg is like, "Cool, I'm down. Just, I bring my coffin everywhere I go so I'll be buried the way I want to, is that cool?" and Ahab is like: "WTF, I don't care."
> 
> So then there's lots of whales. Cataloguing of whales, killing of whales, rhapsodizing about whales. Whatever, it didn't have much to do with this love story so I don't really remember it.
> 
> Now we're at the end and the White Whale is Fucking Shit Up. The ship? Toast. The sailors? Toast. Ahab? One-legged toast. Queequeg dies and it's fucking heartbreaking both that it happens and that it's not given the narrative weight it deserves because Herman Melville Was A Racist.
> 
> Ishmael isn't going to die. (He's the narrator). But how is he going to survive, shitty sailor that he is, on a sinking ship no less, with a huge demon of a white whale Fucking Shit Up? *He rides to safety on Queequeg's coffin.* After *death* Queequeg's cultural traditions, his craftsmanship, his competence and his love save the idiot narrator Ishmael.
> 
> I just -- I love this stupid whaling story.
> 
> *"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." I *feel that* in my *soul.*


End file.
